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Principal leadership changes in South Africa: Investigating their consequences for school performance

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  • Gabrielle Wills

    (Department of Economics, University of Stellenbosch)

Abstract

A rising number of school leadership changes have been occurring in South African schools as a large proportion of incumbent principals near retirement age. While this presents opportunities to replace weaker school principals with better performing ones, these changes may also destabilise school environments and impede on learning. This paper explores how these principal change events affect school performance in the context of South Africa using a unique administrative dataset constructed by linking payroll data on the population of public school principals to national data on schools and matriculation examination outcomes. Exploiting the panel structure of the data, a school fixed effects strategy suggests that principal changes are indeed detrimental to school performance especially when leadership changes are due to principals exiting the public education system. These results are robust to using an alternative estimation strategy proposed by Heckman, Ichimura and Todd (1997) which combines propensity score matching with a difference-in-difference estimation strategy. The paper also considers two mechanisms through which school leadership changes may impact on school performance, namely through rising promotion rates and teacher turnover.

Suggested Citation

  • Gabrielle Wills, 2016. "Principal leadership changes in South Africa: Investigating their consequences for school performance," Working Papers 01/2016, Stellenbosch University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:sza:wpaper:wpapers256
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    File URL: https://www.ekon.sun.ac.za/wpapers/2016/wp012016/wp-01-2016.pdf
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    5. repec:mpr:mprres:7587 is not listed on IDEAS
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    13. Gates, Susan M. & Ringel, Jeanne S. & Santibanez, Lucrecia & Guarino, Cassandra & Ghosh-Dastidar, Bonnie & Brown, Abigail, 2006. "Mobility and turnover among school principals," Economics of Education Review, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 289-302, June.
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    Cited by:

    1. Robert Cameron & Brian Levy, 2016. "The potential and limits of performance management: Improving basic education in the Western Cape," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series esid-062-16, GDI, The University of Manchester.
    2. Jason A. Grissom & Brendan Bartanen, 2019. "Principal Effectiveness and Principal Turnover," Education Finance and Policy, MIT Press, vol. 14(3), pages 355-382, Summer.
    3. Posel, Dorrit & Grapsa, Erofili, 2017. "Time to learn? Time allocations among children in South Africa," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 1-10.
    4. Brian Levy & Robert Cameron & Ursula Hoadley & Vinothan Naidoo, 2016. "The politics and governance of basic education: A tale of two South African provinces," Global Development Institute Working Paper Series esid-067-16, GDI, The University of Manchester.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Principals; school leadership; principal turnover; teacher turnover; school performance;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J63 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs
    • I29 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Other
    • J45 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Particular Labor Markets - - - Public Sector Labor Markets

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